Adrienne Mills, the reservations supervisor at the Ramada Hotel in Reading, cannot recall the last time a woman occupied the ú130-a-night Presidential Suite.
Since the hotel was opened nearly four years ago, the key to the Persian carpeted suite has been handed over the desk mainly to businessmen on expense accounts or the odd honeymoon couple. Indeed, the only women to frequent the hotel's most expensive accommodation are those who work at the Ramada.
After two decades of women's liberation and the fight for sex equality she might have expected a regular demand from females who have battled their way through male bastions. But the fact is those women who have made it mask the reality that for the majority little has changed.
The position of women in Britain today is illustrated in Social Trends 1987, the condensed annual wisdom of the government's statistical service and the nearest thing we get to a "state of the nation" address.
Social Trends reveals that the 51.5% of Britons who are female will between them commit only a quarter of the number of crimes carried out by males over the next 12 months. They will get more school qualifications in English, do 88 times as much washing and ironing, and, due to their greater physical resilience, will survive to grow old in much larger numbers.
In return, full-time working women enjoy nearly nine hours a week less free time than men, are 66 times more likely than men to have to care for children when they are sick, and have teenage daughters who are more likely to be victims of cigarette promotions than sons. Women generally have the worst jobs and earn much less money.
These revelations, some fascinating, some hardly surprising, explain why publication of Social Trends is always eagerly awaited and why in the last few days it has occupied many newspaper pages and offered an opportunity for commentators to hold forth.
Thus we have been told that, for example, the gap between rich and poor has widened, better-off families eat more fish and fruit, 31% of homes have a video and 81% of homes have a telephone. One report digested the fact that it took nine minutes at work for the average man to finance 125 grams of medium priced tea, and that this time was the same in 1971.
But on what many people undoubtedly think is one of the great social policy issues, the reports were oddly subdued. "I can't read other people's minds, but comparisons of the sexes may not be seen as an instant subject," speculates Jackie Morris, associate editor of Social Trends. "I don't know why it hasn't caught people's imaginations. It does usually."
Morris's work, however, offers a unique if incomplete view of the changing balance between the sexes. Change there has certainly been, suggesting a new perception of women as being more in control of their lives and of being freed from some of the more restrictive roles assigned to the female gender. It is now almost taken for granted that women are being "liberated".
One measure of change is the rate at which women sue for divorce. Between 1971 and 1985, the number of wives suing has soared from 67,000 to 139,000, while husbands suing has gone up only from 44,000 to 52,000. Another is the relative growth of cigarette sales to girls as the taboo against female smokers has eroded. Among 16 to 19 year olds, 32% of girls smoke, compared with 29% of boys.
These are odd indicators of progress. More obviously good trends can be seen in schools, where in almost every subject girls have shown the greatest advance in gaining O-levels or equivalent qualifications. In English, girls have increased their lead, in maths they have narrowed the gap and in physics and chemistry they have more than doubled their pass rate since 1970.
Women in education, however, think this a very modest gain. "Much of it is due to girls starting out from a very low base," says Mary Warnock, Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. "I think it is good news, but it is not a sign of any change at all in the position of women in society. I don't think there has been any real shift."
Warnock is one of many people in prominent positions who think progress for women affects only a privileged few. Social Trends reveals that differences in pay between the sexes, a key indicator of equality, are now actually widening as competition for jobs pushes women back. In 1970 men in full-time work earned nearly 80% more than women. By 1981 this had fallen to just under 50%. But by 1985 it was back up to 52%.
Some, like Warnock, have done very well, boosting their incomes in line with their male counterparts. But for the large majority of women, who continue to predominate in low status, poorly paid jobs, there has been little advance in economics or elsewhere. Among manual full-time employees, Social Trends reveals that men earn more than 61% more than women.
In 1985, the most recent year for which the government's statistical service can produce data for inclusion in Social Trends, men in full-time work earned an average ú10,005 a year, or ú192 a week. Women earned ú6,573 a year, or ú126.40 a week. Men also had far greater opportunities to supplement their incomes with overtime.
Under equal opportunities laws passed during the 1970s, pay differentials for comparable work are theoretically banned, but the segregation of the sexes between different occupations is as predominant as ever. "Very often one set of jobs is always done by men and another set is always done by women," says Lady Platt, chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission.
Typical of the sort of employment dominated by women are the 1m jobs in the hotel and catering industry, a traditional low-wage sector. Like Warnock and Platt, the group of women working at the Ramada Hotel in Reading think that little has changed. They comprise two housemaids, earning about ú4,750 a year, a trainee housekeeper on ú5,250, an assistant supervisor earning just over ú6,000, an assistant head housekeeper on ú6,500, reservations supervisor earning about ú7,000 and a secretary earning ú7,250: women's liberation means nothing to them, except something they believed happened a long time ago.
"My husband earns more in a week than I do in a month," says Rosemary Thorne, 31, a housemaid, whose spouse is a supervisor at the nearby Ford motor company factory. "It's disgusting. He just stands there supervising while I have to do hard work. I would like to go and work there, but the excuse I got was that there are so many men there that they wouldn't want a woman."
These women are all employed full-time, but nevertheless carry out most of their own domestic chores. According to Social Trends, 77% of women and 5% of men mainly prepare the evening meal, 72% of women and 3% of men do most of the household cleaning, and 54% of women and 6% of men do most of the shopping. Among full-time employees, men get 33.5 hours of free time a week, compared with women's 24.6 hours.
"It's no surprise that women have less free time than men," says Alison Maxted, 24, a secretary at the hotel since it opened in 1983. "It's the woman that does the cooking, cleaning, shopping, ironing, washing and so on. If you are both doing an eight-hour day, why should the woman still have to come home and cook? Yet we accept it."
This inclination to passivity is also born out in television watching, reported in Social Trends. Women watch about 30 hours a week, compared with men, who on average watch four hours less. They are, however, less interested in newspapers, with 73% in 1985 reading any Sunday paper, compared with 78% of men.
Some trends, however, are still bringing the sexes together. The Women's Institute movement, the Mothers' Union and the National Union of Townswomens' Guilds are all continuing a slow decline, while among young people the Brownies and Guides are losing members to the mixed-sex National Association of Youth Clubs.
These, however, are almost trivial moves and leave the major issues untouched. "There have been some successes, but whether these are any basis for the future, I don't know," says Sylvia Walby, director of the Women's Studies Institute at Lancaster University. "Legislation in the early 1970s had some effect, but otherwise there is a lot to do."
Not everyone was pessimistic this weekend, however, about the figures from Social Trends. As in each of the previous 16 annual publications, one clear difference between the sexes emerges that gives women a cause to celebrate. Crime statistics, often judged a barometer of a stable society, continue to show that males offend more than four times more than females.
Of those offenders who were found guilty by courts or cautioned by the police, females accounted for fewer than five offences per thousand of the population, compared with about 22 per thousand for males. Moreover, the trend among males is rising, while that among females has remained virtually constant for nearly a decade.
"I think one of the best questions to ask is why people don't look at the conformity of women and learn anything from it," says Francis Heidensohn, author of the book Women and Crime. "It could be that men can learn a lot from women - and parents might ask themselves why we can't bring up boys to be a little more like girls."
